Fellowship:what A Way To Live!

Fellowship: What a to Live!

Scripture Reference: Romans 12:1 – 6a

Introduction

The Spirit of God has been at work these past couple of weeks, seeking to either challenge your way of living or confirm your way of living. Because the thing that will grow us or defeat us, strengthen us or weaken us, move us forward or set us back is how we are living our life today.

We have defined the way to live from a Christian perspective through understanding discipleship: the process of being a lifelong learner and follower of Christ determining to go where He goes, do what He does, and say what He says.

We have defined the way to live from a Christian perspective through understanding worship: the spiritual, intellectual, and emotional response to who God is and what God does. God is the focus of worship.

Today we seek to understand the way to live through fellowship. This is one that Rick Warren of Saddleback Church who wrote the Purpose Drive Life has defined as one of our purposes for living --- Fellowship.

As we live for discipleship, the chance to bear the life of Christ in a Christless world, as we live to worship, the chance to honor God in a godless world, we have the chance to fellowship in an isolated and lonely world.

But why talk of fellowship? Are we not fellowshipping in the church today? Have we come to the place that coming together is more important than staying apart? Have relationships among people become more complicated or less complicated?

I have just completed my Doctorates of Ministry degree, one of the highest degrees to achieve in Christian ministry. I am not saying that to brag but to prove something.

I now have two advanced degrees, a Master’s and a Doctorate…I have taken approximately 180 semester hours of instruction over the past five years. That’s approximately 50 – 60 courses of instruction.

There were at least three subjects not offered in any of the degree programs, one was church management from a business perspective, another was on prayer, and the last one was fellowship? No course work, no credit, and no professor.

One teacher once said that at the end of the day when all of the dust is settled we feel like orphans left with nothing but a remote control and television to entertain us because that requires less work.

We have become married to escapism tactics like television, chat rooms, video games, periodic church attendance, to avoid coming together.

The world’s theme of self-absorption has invaded the church with all the emphasis placed on who is going to help me and getting what’s yours, your destiny, your vision, your call as though it operates in a vacuum apart from the whole of what God is doing. (The AIDS quilt)

Fellowship is vital. As Hezekiah Walker has rightly declared…”I need you, you need me, we all a part of God’s body.” We need each other because the best of us can get spiritually dull. The best of us sometimes want to throw in the towel. The best of us sometimes fall flat on our faces.

“Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12), because falling is right around the corner. I have tarried long enough; let me define fellowship and then move into the text.

I am defining fellowship as the opportunity to share our lives with others in order to strengthen, encourage, and build one another up through Jesus Christ.

Fellowshipping with the Savior, Fellowshipping with the Saints, and Fellowshipping with the Sinners are the points for the hour. My three points are woven throughout the entire chapter of Romans 12; I will merely get you started on what you can continue with for the rest of the week.

I. Fellowshipping With The Savior (Romans 12:1 – 2)

As we grow and mature as believers in Christ, we will find that fellowship is vital to living. More specifically, fellowship with our Savior is key to real living.

For which of us will decide that today is not a good day to walk with the Lord? Which of us in here will declare tomorrow, that it is not a good day to walk with God?

God has sought to commune or get with his people for a very long time. It has been His desire to be involved in our lives regularly and consistently.

Leviticus 26:12 I will also walk among you and be your God, and you shall be My people.

John 14:23Jesus replied, "All those who love me will do what I say. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and live with them.

And remember God was so committed to fellowshipping with us that He came and occupied a temporary body like ours to helps see and even greater way to have fellowship with Him as the Father…